Copyright © 2005 by John T. Cullen. All Rights Reserved.

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Intersect: Danger

a novel

by John T. Cullen

27.

U-234 Surrenders: 15-19 May, 1945

The giant Nazi submarine U-234 cruised slowly south through the Atlantic Ocean, subject to constant tension and bickering among the factions on board. Her captain, KL Johann Fehler, was a courageous and adventuresome sailor in the best Germanic tradition. He loved the service, cared for his men, and only nodded to the ruling Nazi elite as a necessary evil. He had a plan, which was well known to the enlisted members of the crew who were fiercely loyal to him. While the Nazi quartermaster service had filled the cargo holds and mine shafts (the tubes used for storing and ejecting sea mines, which the XB type boats were originally built for) with a frightening cargo designed to help Japan win the war, Fehler (whose name in German ironically meant “error”) had his own crew load a three year supply of whisky, food, hunting rifles, and fishing poles. Fehler’s plan was to follow through on his final orders—deliver the jet parts, uranium, and other strategic materials to Japan—and then seize the U-234 by force if necessary and flee thousands of miles away to some uninhabited South Pacific paradise, some uninhabited island or atoll where they could wait out the end of Hitler’s mad war and the return of the world to sanity.

By contrast, the devout Nazis on board—including a naval judge sent to clean up a nest of German war profiteers in wartime Tokyo—and several of the junior officers, alternated between hysteria over Germany’s desperate situation, and a kind of fanatical faith that somehow the Fuehrer would make it all right again.

Sitting on the sidelines were several other fanatics, like the two Japanese military officers accompanying the boat’s deadly cargo of mass destruction.

The XB boats were designed in the late 1930s and early 40s as ocean-going submersible mine-layers. They could carry up to 66 mines in 30 mine shafts, as well as 15 torpedoes in two stern tubes. Now, to facilitate the long voyage around the world, the aft torpedo rooms had been sealed off and turned into diesel fuel tanks, with compensating saltwater ballast tanks added to the bow area. Redesignated as Japan transports, the XB class carried cargo in special containers fitted to the mine shafts. At 2710 tons submerged and fully loaded, the biggest German U-boats ever built, they were slow and cumbersome. In the waning months of German power, they had been converted to the new snorkel technology, which allowed them to stay submerged for days or even weeks at a time. This had become important since Allied air and naval power had achieved near total domination of surface and air. The U-234 had an enormous snorkel boom mounted on a swivel behind her sail, or conning tower. The snorkel, which was round and had a circumference about like a man’s waist, folded down into a special notch that ran along the upper central deck from the sail toward the stern. When standing erect, the snorkel stood slightly higher than the sail itself, or about periscope height. While the boat had a respectable surface speed (up to 20 knots), she had to crawl at about 8 knots when submerged with only snorkel raised. At night, she could travel on the surface while blowing out her atmosphere and recharging her diesel batteries. By day, she inched along under the surface. Thus, it took her more than two weeks to reach the South Atlantic, and it might take her another month to reach Japan.

From the outset, there was conflict in the officers’ mess. Fehler, a temperamental, strong-willed officer typical of the best combat pilots and U-boat commanders, took it in stride. Possessed of a fiery wit and a zest for life, he quickly tired of the rigid posturing of some of his guests, and in fact of one or two of his own officers. This wasn’t anything new—German military units often did have politically oriented officers who spouted the usual Hitler drivel while everyone else circumspectly kept their mouths shut. Fehler relieved the officer of the first watch, replacing him with one of the passengers. The passenger, KL Richard Bulla, was an old friend from Fehler’s earlier navy days, and a regular Navy officer rather than a doctrinaire party hack.

There was a constant antagonism between Lieutenant Colonel Kai Nieschling, a military judge and loyal Nazi, and the senior guest officer on board, Major General Ulrich Kessler.

Kessler, a Luftwaffe general, was an expert in antiaircraft and antiship missiles. In more flush times, he might have been cashiered for his unorthodox views. In today’s desperate climate, he was merely being shifted as far from the ruling party’s horizon of view as possible—to Tokyo as the new German air attaché.

Kessler never had a good word to say about either Hitler, the government, or the management of the Luftwaffe starting with Goering at the top and working down. Day after day, these officers argued at the captain’s mess. Nieschling and some of the junior officers would invariable side against Kessler, while nobody but Fehler dared to open his mouth. Fehler, for his part, couldn’t tell Kessler to keep his mouth shut, though it aggravated Fehler that the bickering was inevitably going to affect morale among the NCOs and junior enlisted men. Then again, Fehler had already provisioned the ship for its hoped for cowboy escape, and he knew the men weren’t dumb—they knew the war was lost and it was just a matter of time to try and survive while the remaining Nazis lived in and out of their fantasy dreams and plotted their escape to safe havens around the world. Meanwhile, Fehler had some heated private conversations with Kessler in Fehler’s private cabin. The two men were, to begin with, genuine military officers rather than party functionaries. Fehler was a native Berliner who had distinguished himself from the ground up. Raised in a middle class household of no particular social distinction, he had enlisted in the merchant marine as a deckhand on a sailing vessel. From there, he’d worked his way up on merit alone to the merchant marine academy. He’d joined the Nazi party more as a matter of swimming with the tide—he personally had no hatred for anyone, Russian, Jew, or otherwise, and had moderate political views. By 1936 he was an officer cadet and well on his way to being the commanding officer of a minesweeper surface vessel when World War II began with the invasion of Poland in 1939. During the early years of the war, he distinguished himself as a technical expert—mines and explosives officer—on the raider Atlantis, which sank at least 22 Allied vessels during his tenure.

Kessler, on the other hand, was a born and raised Prussian Juncker, a member of the old imperial aristocracy. He was older than Fehler, having seen service in World War I. He was a hard, stony individual, tall, arrogant, utterly sure of himself. Like so many regular Army officers (though he’d been navy at first and then switched to Luftwaffe during the 1930s, immediately sparking dislike between himself and Goering) Kessler hated the upstarts who had brought Germany to ruin. In this, he and the other aristocratic military officers took their cue from none other than the deceased World War I hero and former President, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg. Though deeply mistrustful of Hitler, von Hindenburg had accepted the popular will in the 1933 elections, in which a majority of the German electorate put Hitler in power through democratic means. Hindenburg had accepted the popular will for the sake of national unity after a generation of civil war and economic disaster. Von Hindenburg had died shortly afterward, and Reichskanzler Hitler had quickly maneuvered to consolidate power into himself. Terminating the unpopular Weimar Republic, Hitler had kept the office to which he’d been elected—Reichskanzler—and added Von Hindenburg’s old post as President to his own totem. In the new Third Reich, however, Hitler had created a new office for himself—supreme leader, or Führer. The Junckers, while serving Hitler to preserve what was left of their imperial power base (the Emperor had abdicated under revolutionary pressure in 1918, and the empire was finished forever), hated and resented Hitler and the coterie of drunks, drug addicts, perverts, and sadists he brought to power: Roehmer, a sadistic pedophile; Goering, a drug addict and hedonist; Goebbels, a megalomaniac; Ley, a violent drunk who liked to tear his beautiful blonde wife’s clothes off in public to demonstrate what a prize she was—“like Germania herself,” he liked to say—until she committed suicide; and a whole host of other freaks and misfits. Kessler’s utter contempt was, to Fehler, understandable by mid-1945 when the two men found themselves on a fool’s errand like this. Kessler, however, was more than a stiff-necked throwback. Kessler had the general scientific and engineering training of a good officer in the modern service, and he was politically useful at a high level because he cut a dashing figure in his long leather coat, peaked cap, white gloves, polished leather boots, and frequently a monocle—the embodiment of the Prussian aristocracy and officer corps that had been decimated again in yet another national misadventure.

Whatever class and age distinctions survived between the two men, they shared more in common. Both had won the Iron Cross for valor. Both had distinguished themselves in many ways. Both were essentially honest, fair, clear thinkers within the relative sphere of those concepts in the Third Reich. Both were pragmatists who saw the handwriting on the wall. Furthermore, as captain of the boat, Fehler was the officer in charge, while Kessler was by far the most senior man on board, the only flag officer, so there was a considerable stalemate of the wills, of protocols, of military courtesies. In a word, Fehler was impressed with Kessler.

As Fehler shared a few glasses of schnapps and smoked a cigar or two with his guest, he learned that Kessler had an escape plan of his own, which he confided to Fehler. Fehler also learned of a top level plan from Berlin that left Fehler’s head spinning with its audacity and fantastic scope. Aboard, Kessler told him, was material to make the most devastating weapon of all time.

Fehler laughed.

“No, no,” Kessler said soberly, “this is not one of their crazy delusions.”

Fehler felt a chill as he poured each of them another small snifter of brandy. “Herr General, I’m a simple U-boat commander. Perhaps you can enlighten me under the bond of secrecy?”

Kessler nodded grimly. “Ka-Leu, it is essential that I share this information with you.” He raised his tiny glass in a toast, and Fehler was bound by courtesy to follow suit. “Ka-Leu, we have talked about your Pacific island, your wild pigs, your hunting rifles...”

“Are you sure you don’t want to join us, Herr General?” Fehler said feeling the warmth of the alcohol and a touch of delirium—after years of war, deprivation, seeing warriors and civilians die horribly—for what?

Kessler raised a palm. “No, no, that is not for me.” In his own cold, grim way, he radiated a supreme sense of biting and brilliant humor. “I have a special request to make, Ka-Leu. I want you to set me down on the Argentine coast.”

Fehler felt a knot in his stomach. “That would mean a considerable diversion from our course, General. At least a week if you wanted me to set you out near Buenos Aires, let us say.”

“I understand fully well the risks to you and your crew,” Kessler said with a sharpness that reminded a duty-bound German, Fehler, of his Pflicht.

“Think of it this way,” Kessler said. “My situation is a bit more precarious than yours. If I am captured in Japan at war’s end, as military attaché I become a war criminal. If I intern myself in Argentina, I become a tango dancer. In the former case, I may be hanged—who knows what vengeance the Allies will visit on all of our heads for the horrors we perpetrated on the world in Hitler’s name. On the other hand, if I depart the scene quietly in the middle of this mission, I may well be able to convince the world that I was against Hitler—that would be the truth, anyway.”

Fehler nodded. “I understand, Sir. I will plot a diversionary course.”

“Danke, Ka-Leu.” Kessler was almost warm as he said it, though he was essentially giving an order to an underling of the commoner class.

He did seem sincere, Fehler thought, calculating how much the diversion would cost him in fuel, time, and risk from enemy action. “To be honest, Sir, I am in no hurry to reach Japan.”

“You are a wise man,” Kessler said. “I had that opinion of you.”

“Thank you, General.”

“Think of it this way, Fehler. There are plenty of us who are wise to Hitler. He never did have any lost love for us Prussians.” This was a blatant attempt to curry a bit of false camaraderie, Fehler recognized, but the condescension didn’t annoy him. Both men were products of the same system, just different rungs in the same ladder. “Think of it this way. There is a network of good Germans around the world, and by helping me you help yourself. Understood?”

“Yessir.”

The topic of conversation switched, coming to rest on Kessler’s final responsibilities. “I understand the nature of our cargo, Fehler. If we are to carry on with our plan, you should understand what it is you bring to our yellow-skinned friends Im Land der Aufgehenden Sonnet (‘In the Land of the Rising Sun’).”

“And what is that, Sir?”

Kessler leaned forward at the small table in the small cabin, rubbing his hands between his knees. He looked over his shoulder, though the door was locked and nobody could be listening. “Imagine,” he whispered, “imagine, Fehler, if you will. The Japanese have been getting pushed back almost to their own homeland. It is only a matter of time before the Americans and their Allies have to think about invading Fortress Japan. But turn the tables around. Suddenly, one day, boom! First Los Angeles, then San Francisco, and that is only the beginning.” His face lit up. “Chicago, land of the gangsters. Then Dallas, in the land of the cowboys and Indians!”

“What, Sir?” Fehler frowned. What could his guest be talking about?

“A bomb, Fehler, a gigantic bomb, the likes of which the world has never before seen or dreamed. Or heard.”

“I don’t quite follow, Sir.” He’d heard stories, rumors, about work being done on splitting the atom. A German scientist had accomplished that.

“An atomic bomb, Ka-Leu. A single bomb contains enough energy to blow up a city the size of Berlin or New York. Can you imagine? Blow up a city and kill more human beings in ten seconds than the entire fire bombing and the weeks of fire storms that the British caused in Dresden or the Americans are causing in Tokyo.”

“Such a bomb, Sir, is it not a century in the future?”

“No, no, my dear fellow, we carry the uranium right here in this submarine, along with the jet airplanes to deliver them.”

“No!” The war might yet drag on for more years. He’d been so looking forward to his idyll on the Pacific atolls, but beyond that to the eventual return of Germany to some sort of peacetime normalcy—or was such a thing ever possible again?

“Come,” Kessler said one evening, “let me show you.” He led Fehler from the captain’s cabin and through a maze of narrow corridors surrounded on all sides by thumping machinery and dim lights. They walked along rattling catwalks and up narrow ladders until they reached the wide cargo areas of the boat’s original design. Here, in rack after rack of vertical shafts reaching toward hatches on the upper deck, were the shafts in which mines were to be stowed until they were launched into the sea. Now the hatches were welded shut and the shafts were now important cargo holds. Kessler unlocked one of the compartments and pulled the door open. “Look inside, Ka-Leu.”

Fehler leaned forward into the spacious compartment, which had been designed so two loaders could push a barrel-shaped mine sideways into place on top of a launching mechanism. There sat a wooden crate smelling of linseed oil; several cardboard tubes; a stack of manuals bound in blue cardstock covers; and other odds and ends. On top sat three metal boxes, each about 25 mm to a side, about the size of a child’s torso.

“Those boxes are gold-lined. They were packed in special laboratories, Fehler. They are filled with high-grade uranium oxide ore. Open one of those, and you are soon dead from the radiation inside.”

“Radium,” Fehler whispered with a pang.

“Not technically correct, but close,” Kessler said condescendingly. “There are ten of these boxes. They will change the fate of mankind, these little boxes, unless they wind up at the bottom of the sea. And that we must not allow to happen.” He slammed the door shut and locked it. “You see your duty is clear, Fehler. You must get these into the hands of the Japanese, and our loyal German compatriots will ensure that you are amply rewarded in the years after the war.”

Johann-Heinrich Fehler found himself quickly busy with other tasks, leaving Kessler to his plans. The rancor in the mess continued unabated, particularly as Hitler’s birthday on April 20 came and went. The Fuehrer, poised defiantly in his bunker in Berlin as Soviet armies closed around him, was now 56 years old. Kessler loudly and angrily ridiculed Hitler, Goering, and the rest of the party elite. He pointedly refused to participate in any of the solemn as well as the more light-hearted ceremonies. Fehler didn’t blame him, but felt frustrated at the general’s unwillingness to play along with the game. The sailors, who appeared shocked at this display of disrespect and temperament on the part of a high-ranking Juncker officer, went about their duties with much the same bemusement with which they continued serving the Fatherland under increasingly arduous and bizarre circumstances.

The two Japanese officers were quiet and diffident, but resolutely respectful of their hosts. They remained stoic in the face of insults Kessler hurled at them and their cherished emperor before storming out of festively bedecked mess.

Another ten days went by, punctuated by either bitter silence or violent arguments at meals.

Meanwhile, the radio dispatcher kept receiving messages by short-wave radio from around the world, particularly in German from the Atlantic naval headquarters in Kiel.

Suddenly, on May 1, the dispatcher rose, threw down his headphone, and ran with a face pale as snow to fetch the skipper.

When Johann-Heinrich Fehler’s voice quietly rang through the boat shortly thereafter, ordering all hands to stand by for a message, an electrified silence pervaded the vessel. Except for a few muffled shouts of anguish, and the continued throbbing of the diesels as they sucked air through the snorkel and turned the screws that pushed U-234 further south, all was still as on a Sunday morning.

Heavy-hearted, with mixed feelings, Fehler took the microphone and spoke. He felt tears streaming down his face, not out of any love of Hitler, but for the millions of brave men who had died—for what?—and the flower of German women and children who had been horribly sacrificed, to the bleak end that now lay at hand. With the habits learned from a dozen years of life under the Nazi regime with its Gestapo and its propaganda, with its knock on the door at 3 a.m., and with the habits of military discipline, his mouth spoke the usual formulaic words while his heart drowned in entirely different feelings: “My fellow German sailors, I have the sad duty to report to you that the Fuehrer died yesterday while at his duty station in the defense of Berlin. The honor of leading the Reich now befalls one of our own, Grand Admiral Doenitz, who continues to direct the defense of the Fatherland from his headquarters in Kiel. At this time, our orders remain operative and we proceed with our mission.” At a loss for words, he replaced the microphone in its cradle, and the loud click of its hook engaging its eyelet echoed through the ghostly corridors of the boat as she churned on, serviced by silent sailors with shocked and pale faces.

U-234 was snorkeling south two weeks after departing Norway.In the mid-Atlantic, south of the Equator, a storm hit, and he was forced to surface to recharge his batteries and the air inside the wave-tossed boat. By prearranged plan—for they remained under strict radio silence—the U-234 made a rendez-vous with another German sub, the U-530, an aging boat of the 33rd Flotilla, half the size of the U-234, that had been cruising on various missions from the Baltic to the South Atlantic since the loss of French seaports in 1944. Under cover of darkness, on a cloudy night when the air was filled with drizzle, the two boats lay rocking within a hundred meters of one another, and there was an exchange of rubber dinghies. This in itself was not unusual, given that subs passed mail, courier pouches, and all kinds of technological gadgets routinely among each other.

This time, however, the commander of the U-530 came on board. He was the young (24) and relatively inexperienced KL Otto Wermuth, and he had sailed from a layover in Kristiansand on March 4, about five weeks before the U-234 had left that Norwegian port. The two skippers shook hands and conferred over cognac in Fehler’s cabin. “What is your plan?” Fehler asked the much younger officer.

“I have jettisoned all my armaments, including ciphers and so forth, and am turning south toward Argentina to buy some time and possibly intern my ship. Do you have a better idea, Hans?” His eyes blazed with desperation, and his teeth were gritted in a beard-grizzled young face.

Fehler shook his head slowly. “I wish I could advise you, Otto. I continue to maintain radio silence in case there is further action out of Kiel, but I have no more incoming information than you probably do.”

“But you continue on your mission?”

Fehler said nothing. He was becoming more and more unsure of that fact as the hours, no, even the minutes passed.

“My major responsibility now,” Wermuth said laying his fist across the table and staring bitterly into space to one side, “is to ensure the safety of my crew. I cannot think of a smarter thing to do.”

Fehler felt sorry for him and patted his shoulder. “You are doing the right thing, I am sure.” He could not mention the critical cargo. In any case, from the wartime habit of knowing everyone had secrets, Wermuth did not ask any questions. “Good, then, Hans, I will get along. The dispatches, such as they are, have been exchanged”

The two men shook hands. “Alles gute,” they told one another, “All good things to you.”

The two subs parted company in the middle of the night, and U-234 continued her lonely journey.

General Kessler and Fehler met in the skipper’s cabin at Kessler’s request. “Ka-Leu,” he said, removing his monocle, “this is a situation that begins to remind me of the anarchy of 1918.” He looked stoic, but grim. He wore a casual but dignified blue-green Luftwaffe fatigue uniform with submariner’s deck shoes.

Fehler nodded slowly. “Twenty-six years gone by, and it's back to that.”

“Far worse,” Kessler said, “and it will be worse yet. This time, Cossacks will ravage the nation. It is unthinkable what they will do to our women and children. We must keep cool heads now, Fehler, and do the right thing.”

“And what do you propose that to be, General?”

Kessler folded his arms and laid forth his thoughts. “It is clear, naturally, that Doenitz cannot hold the show together. He is a far better man than any of the jackals Hitler surrounded himself with, but he is simply a place holder. He will ready the Reich for total, formal surrender. I understand from some of the short-wave traffic that he is concentrating on keeping Baltic fleet units operational as long as possible to ferry German military and civilians out of Russian territory and into British and American zones of influence.” He paused a second, and Fehler knew the silence was to reflect on the loss, on January 30, of the Wilhelm Gustloff with over 10,000 men, women, and children. The former luxury liner had been torpedoed by a Soviet submarine and gone down in icy waters in the North Sea with the worst loss of life in human maritime history. As horrific as Fehler found that to be, it was emblematic of what Hitler had done to the German people, or rather what they had allowed him to do. Now that the Austrian vagrant was dead, it was possible to begin tallying somehow whatever good and bad he might have done, and it was difficult to find anything to fill in the positives column. “Fehler, I anticipate Germany will surrender within a week, maybe two. I could have gone along with our friend Wermuth to his fate in Argentina, if he reaches it, considering Argentina finally declared war on Germany on March 27...”

He paused to let the bitter irony of that settle in, the cowardice of those nations that were now lining up to kick the corpse of Germany now that she could not gore them anymore. “...but there is a more important consideration by far.” He poured them each a neat little thumb-full of schnapps. “Think about it, man. We can actually do something good for mankind, and become heroes of a sort, ja?”

“My men will need convincing to produce any more heroics, General.”

“I understand perfectly. Now consider. During the past few weeks, a whole line-up of nations have declared war on Germany, clearly and cynically so they can participate at the victory table after doing nothing or playing both sides against each other. I anticipate that Stalin will be up to his usual utter treachery again, and will declare war on Japan. If you think the Japs can hold out much longer, you have got to live in a fantasy world. For all we know, we might arrive in Japan in another two or three months and surrender your sub to the Americans. Therefore, Fehler, I strongly urge you to surrender to the Americans now.”

Fehler felt his jaw drop. “Under no circumstances...”

Kessler’s face was contemptuous. “Why, Fehler? Pflicht? Or Flucht? Or just plain zum fluchen?” Fehler looked down at his own knotted fists on the table and let the other man’s savage wordplay tear through his mind: “Duty? Or flight? Or just plain curses at our bad luck?”

Kessler stabbed his forefinger repeatedly down on the tabletop for emphasis. “We have to think clearly now, Fehler. Stalin is Germany’s mortal enemy, whether one is a Nazi or not. The Soviet Union sits a few hundred kilometers from the Japanese islands. Vladivostok, Sakhalin, the Kuriles—all within a short sail to Japan. Now think of this. The greatest naval humiliation in history was the total destruction of the Czarist navy just 40 years ago at Tsushima. The Russians have a big score to settle with those little yellow monkeys. You understand, Fehler? We have no friends in this world, especially not after what we have done. Our only recourse is to obtain mercy from the victors, and it won’t be from Stalin. We must throw ourselves and your crew on the mercy of the Americans or the British, the sooner the better.”

“No!” Fehler said, thinking of his Pacific islands.

“Yes!” Kessler said. “We carry the material that Stalin can capture to make Wunderwaffen, super weapons, to annihilate entire German cities. Do you comprehend what I am saying? The danger is not that the Japanese will irritate Amerika by blowing up a few cities. The danger is that Stalin will pulverize Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg, who knows how many German cities, in his revenge. There is a man who is an even greater monster than Hitler. Stalin murders anyone who even thinks a disloyal thought, and in many cases totally innocent people. Stalin is totally mad, insane, and we cannot allow this cargo to fall into his hands!”

Fehler was silent a long time. “I will think about it, General. I believe we have a few days to think. We continue to run under radio silence, here in the South Atlantic, as I decide what to do with my boat.”

The debate that raged among the guests and officers was fierce. It went on for days, with Kai Nieschling and his fellow Nazis more determined than ever to do some unnamed heroics, while Kessler and Fehler, as well as First Officer Karl Ernst Pfaff, began to think of throwing the Nazis overboard and letting them swim home through shark-infested waters.

None were more stoic and silent and dignified than the two Japanese officers: Air Force Colonel Genzo Shoji, an aeronautical engineer, and Navy Captain Hideo Tomonaga, a submarine architect by profession. Whatever was going through their minds, Fehler knew, it wasn’t pleasant. Given the Japanese reputation for drastic action under this kind of pressure, in fact, Fehler began to carry his Luger service revolver in its leather holster and belt, draped over his black service fatigues, in case he had to stop them from some dramatic effort to seize the boat and ram the nearest Allied warship in a suicide gesture. But it wasn’t to come to that. Just in case, Fehler armed Pfaff and certain key trusted warrant officers and chiefs, to be ready for any eventuality.

On May 7, the short-wave service reported that Grand Admiral Doenitz had unconditionally surrendered the German Reich from his temporary headquarters at Flensburg on the Danish coast. It was an ironic choice of places, Fehler thought grimly, thinking that “Flensburg” sounded a lot like the German “flehensburg,” which would mean a city of weeping if there were such a place. When Fehler made the announcement over the loudspeaker, in fact, one or two chiefs looked at each other like old men hard of hearing and asked “What did he say? Weeping?” By now, everyone was done with weeping, and the Nazis had fallen strangely silent as they began to consider the world of reality for the first time in their careers. Half of them had ever fired a shot in anger or been shot at, living instead in the airy rhetoric of their late hero. The sight of tough, bitter, strapping young sailors armed with pistols and grim expressions unnerved them, cowed them into silence, above all the frumpy and precise Kai Nieschling.

No more arguments at the mess table.

Fehler knocked on Kessler’s cabin door.

“Eintreten,” Kessler snapped. “Step inside.”

Fehler stepped inside and closed the door. “I have considered your thoughts, General, and I wish to report that I concur. We must surrender to the Allies as soon as possible.”

“Excellent!” Kessler said, standing up from where he’d been crouched in the cramped cabin, writing notes while reading the pages of Frederick the Great’s memoirs.

“It gives me absolutely no joy,” Fehler said.

“Of course not,” Kessler said briskly, rubbing his hands. “Excellent choice. Best thing we can do under the circumstances. So—you tell me—what is the best way to reach the Allies?”

“First things first,” Fehler said.

So he had the sailors begin their task of filling canvas mail sacks with priceless items—the Enigma machine; cipher books; the ship’s log; any documents that might be incriminating or give away Reich secrets; the Tunis RADAR detector; the Kurier transmitter. The sacks then had ballast added in the form of metal machine parts, ammunition belts, anything heavy, and were tossed one by one into the sea. Several chiefs walked the length of the boat on each side, looking carefully to make sure no sack had snagged and might be hanging in the water ready to be plucked out by their eventual jailers. For Fehler, the most melancholy part of the entire operation now came, as he went aft to the passenger cabins to inform Shoji and Tomonaga of his decision. The two Japanese, who had been whiling their time away quietly reading and talking, jumped up from their bunks in horror and began remonstrating with him. Between their broken German and their high pitch of excitement, they had a hard time making themselves understood. One thing was clear: they were desperate to have Fehler continue his journey to Japan, and at one point one of them was on his knees, in tears, beseeching Fehler to change his mind. When Fehler tried to reason with them, they became all the more irascible, so that he called on a chief and several sailors to take away the two Japanese officers’ pistols and swords. He ordered them confined to quarters, under guard, for fear of mutiny or sabotage.

After an hour or two, the dual nature of their distress became clear to him. First of all, they were fanatically dedicated to the cult of their emperor, whom they considered a living god. Secondly, and this he only now began to realize, by offering to surrender to the Americans, he had unwittingly pronounced a death knell on these two men. He realized this with a pang of regret, though he was still steamed up about their earlier seeming unreasonableness, and in any case he had to put the well-being of the ship and its complement above the decisions these men were about to make for themselves.

The naval officer, Tomonaga, spoke for both of them. “It becomes necessary for us, then, to follow the path of honor prescribed by Bushido, the code of the samurai warrior. We cannot surrender to the enemy. It would be a betrayal of our emperor and nation.” As Tomonaga spoke, both men bowed repeatedly from the waist. Their faces looked grim, their eyes black with anticipation of their fate.

“This is your choice, not mine,” Fehler told them. “I have reasons for doing what I consider to be the right thing for my crew, my boat, and my own nation.”

They bowed again, and Tomonaga said: “Please, Captain, we ask only that you respect our passing and do not interfere with our way.”

Fehler felt anger welling up, but there was so much death and destruction these days, and he had so much to do, that he could not waste time trying to subdue these men. Nor did he feel he had the right to do so. It was his boat, and he had practically the power of life and death over anyone on it, but something told him this was a matter beyond his right to interfere. Besides, many a patriotic German officer had recently taken his life rather than face humiliation again as Germany had in 1918.

About an hour later, a sailor came to ask Fehler to come aft to see his Japanese passengers. With misgivings, Fehler followed the man. He found a small knot of curious men gathered outside the cabin door, along with the guard he had posted there earlier. Pushing his way inside, he found the two men lying side by side on their bunks with their arms linked as if they were jumping together into the unknown.

On the floor nearby lay an empty bottle, which Fehler picked up and examined—Luminal, a brand of Phenobarbital. Deliberate overdose.

“Is there a pulse?” he asked the medical technician who stood nearby.

The man shrugged and checked their wrists. “Faint. They are still alive. There is a note for you from them.” He handed Fehler a letter, which Fehler opened with a hopeless feeling, to read with trembling hands.

It took the two men more than a full day to die.

At the following daybreak, Fehler led an all-hands Christian funeral for them, although they had been Buddhists and Shintoists.

The two bodies, tied into weighted canvas sea bags, lay on deck during the service, draped with the Rising Sun colors that the U-boat was supposed to fly on her bridge upon entry into Tokyo Bay. Under the flag, in their burial bags, both deceased men lay dressed in their best uniforms, complete with their officer or samurai swords.

The two men, who had been good guests and had never made of nuisance of themselves, but shared the hardships without complaint, had left a pathetic little will bequeathing various little personal items to crewmen they had befriended. To Fehler they had left a small sum of money with which to contact their relatives in Japan to inform them that “We are dead, but did not disgrace ourselves in dying.”

As their bodies slid off the wet deck, down into the sea with two small splashes quickly drowned by the deep ocean waves, Fehler at that moment more than ever realized, visualized, how drastically all things had changed.

Soon afterward, the radioman came running topside. “Sir! Sir! I have raised an American destroyer!”

“Let me see,” Fehler said, tearing the sheet of flimsy from the man’s hands. Sure enough—it was the U.S.S. Sutton, responding to their calls.